Anger over Sajid Javid’s advice to not ‘cower’ from Covid | Sajid Javid | The Guardian
Sajid Javid has provoked a wave of anger from families of the victims of Covid after he said people must no longer “cower” from the virus.
The health secretary announced on Saturday that he had made a “full recovery” from Covid-19 after falling ill eight days ago, and said: “Please, if you haven’t yet, get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus.”
Jo Goodman, the co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said Javid’s “comments are deeply insensitive on a number of levels”.
“Not only are they hurtful to bereaved families, implying our loved ones were too cowardly to fight the virus, but they insult all those still doing their best to protect others from the devastation this horrific virus can bring,” she said.
Labour accused him of denigrating people who followed the rules to protect others, while the Lib Dems told him to apologise to those who have shielded because they are particularly vulnerable to the disease.
David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, called into question the health secretary’s use of the word cower, in words echoed by the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner.
“129,000 Brits have died from Covid under your government’s watch,” Lammy wrote. “Don’t denigrate people for trying to keep themselves and their families safe.”
The Lib Dem’s health spokesperson, Munira Wilson, said Javid’s tweet was “outrageous” while thousands remain in hospital with Covid.
“His careless words have insulted every man, woman and child who has followed the rules and stayed at home to protect others,” she said in a statement. “He owes them all, especially the millions who are shielding, an apology.”
Ian Blackford, the SNP’s leader in Westminster, said: “‘Cower from this virus.’ Really. The job of government is to keep people safe. To show empathy with folk. To seek to protect people when necessary. This is not acceptable. You might want to reflect and think about your role as health secretary in England.” …
(Source: theguardian.com)
Boris Johnson’s sums don’t add up.
Boris Johnson’s alleged comparison was inappropriate, mixes different averages and ignores rising life expectancy as we age
According to the BBC, on 15 October, the prime minister allegedly sent a WhatsApp message: “I must say I have been rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82 – 81 for men, 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer.” Presumably, this was a joke, but why is the reasoning so wrong?
First, more technically, the message confuses two types of averages. As children learn at school, the median means that if you lined up the women according to the age they had died of Covid-19, the woman in the middle would be 85. But life expectancy is a mean-average – you work out how long, say, 100,000 newborns are likely to live assuming that current mortality rates continue, add them up and divide by 100,000. Using data from the UK for 2017-19, life expectancy at birth is 79 for men and 83 for women, but the median age at death is slightly higher: 81 for men and 85 for women, the same as that quoted for Covid-19.
So why do registered deaths involving Covid have a similar median age to deaths from other causes? Essentially, the risk factors for dying with Covid are remarkably similar to those for dying from something else – this bullying virus amplifies vulnerabilities and so roughly acts like a multiplication factor to background fatal risks.
Even more importantly, your life expectancy improves as you age. Once a man reaches 79, their life expectancy rises: to about 88, or nine more years. Fortunately, your death keeps on moving ahead of you and reaching the life expectancy you had at birth does not mean you are about to shift off this mortal coil. An average man reaching their 98th birthday can expect to live beyond 100.
The Health Foundation estimated a mean-average of 10 years of life lost for every Covid-19 death, with a similar figure for the US, and this holds even when allowing for pre-existing health conditions. So Covid-19 fatalities were not at death’s door.
Get Covid-19 and live longer? Sadly not.
David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge. Anthony Masters is statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society
(Source: theguardian.com)
Labour must say it out loud: Brexit needs to be reversed | William Keegan | The Guardian
In Northern Ireland, the Leavers’ folly is now manifest. How can the opposition stay silent about the root cause of the crisis?
(Source: theguardian.com)
Why isn’t Joe Biden doing all he can to protect American democracy? | Robert Reich | The Guardian
(Source: theguardian.com)
There is growing anger among families bereaved by the US opioid epidemic at pharmaceutical companies “buying their way out of accountability” with multibillion-dollar settlements that specifically exclude any admission of wrongdoing.
The opioid maker Johnson & Johnson and the country’s three largest drug distributors on Wednesday agreed to pay $26bn to settle a raft of lawsuits accusing them of acting recklessly and illegally in pushing prescription opioid sales when they knew the painkillers were driving an epidemic of addiction and overdoses.
But after announcing the deal, Johnson & Johnson continued to insist its actions were “appropriate and responsible”. The distributors said they still “strongly dispute the allegations made in these lawsuits” even though they have previously paid significant fines to settle federal claims that they broke the law.
Families bereaved by the opioid epidemic, which has claimed 600,000 lives in two decades, criticised what they regard as a persistent failure to hold to account pharmaceutical executives who manufactured the worst drug crisis in US history by manipulating federal regulators and the medical profession into mass-prescribing narcotics with false claims about their safety and effectiveness.
Emily Walden, chair of the Fed Up! coalition of families harmed by opioids, said the restitution payments are relatively small for some of the country’s largest businesses, particularly when they will be made over up to 18 years.
“This should not be ‘the cost of doing business’, another tax write-off,” Walden said. “They need to pay for what they’ve actually done. And then criminal charges need to come against these executives.”
Walden lost her son TJ to an opioid overdose stemming from a painkiller prescription at 11 years old.
“I don’t think we would let a cartel get away with this. So why is it different for a corporation that knew exactly what they were doing? They knew the harm that was resulting and they continued. They get away with paying a fine? There are people sitting in jail for years for possession of drugs, illegal drugs, but still only possession. And these executives are going to walk?”
Johnson & Johnson is renowned in legal circles for fighting lawsuits but it has been less keen to go to court over opioid cases after an Oklahoma judge in 2019 ordered it to pay the state $465m in restitution in a damning verdict that characterised the company’s executives as little better than drug pushers.
Last month, the company agreed to pay $230m to avoid a jury trial after it was sued by New York’s attorney general.
The three drug distributors – McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health – are still on trial in a West Virginia civil case that has made highly embarrassing revelations about their failure to fulfil legal requirements to report and halt suspiciously large-scale orders even as they poured more than 1bn opioid painkillers in to the state between 2006 and 2014.
West Virginia has long had the highest opioid overdose death rate in the US.
In emails, executives at AmerisourceBergen called people who became addicted to opioids “pillbillies”, spoke of parts of the country blighted by the epidemic as “OxyContinville” and responded to new regulations in Kentucky to curb painkiller prescribing by writing: “One of the hillbilly’s [sic] must have learned how to read :-)”. …
… Earlier this month, the US justice department trustee, William Harrington, who oversees the federal bankruptcy system, accused the Sacklers of misusing the process to avoid liability for “alleged wrongdoing in concocting and perpetuating for profit one of the most severe public health crises ever experienced in the United States”.
Harrington said the bankruptcy deal would mean families devastated by opioids could receive as little as $3,500 in compensation. The Sacklers would retain several billion dollars of the profits from OxyContin. …
(Source: theguardian.com)
The new space race between the world’s richest men proves one thing to the rest of us – the sooner they leave this planet the better
Space-sized egos, tiny tax bills… Billionaires should be jettisoned | Life and style | The Guardian
(Source: theguardian.com)
[video]
A Non-Political Message to the DKos Community: Leave Nothing Unsaid or Unknown With Your Partner. -
Yesterday, my wife of 18+ years died suddenly. …
…I’m realizing there are things that I’m uncertain of and details of many things that she was working on that would affect my family’s finances and security (among them our son possibly receiving SSDI, and some legal cases to which she was a party). She was also a well-regarded author on the WIT app, and has a number of Facebook groups which she contributed and helped in, yet I have no way of reaching either as I don’t know exactly where her footprint is seen.
I don’t know her passwords or any of her PINs, nor do I know any of her contacts or points of contact for her legal cases. I never thought to ask about any of these things because it was literally unthinkable she would pass on so suddenly.
And now the unthinkable has happened, and I’m left to try to pick up the pieces of these things and ensure the security of my family.
I’m writing this to our Community not for sympathy or assistance, but because I have a single message for everyone reading this:
Talk with your partner, leave nothing unsaid, and if they be worthy trust and share everything you have…because tomorrow they may be gone, and you may be alone and not know important, potentially life-saving information.
Whoever you are with, be their partner in all things, and never take them or their presence for granted. Life can end in a literal heart-beat, yours or theirs, and there’s no more terrifying feeling that you were ignorant of something small but vital.
Talk, share, and above all LOVE your partners enough to make this effort. Otherwise…why are you with them in the first place? …
(Source: dailykos.com)
Proud Boys Leader Joe Biggs Whines In Letter From Seminole County Jail... -
Warning! Swallow your beverage before reading further, then rosin up the bow of your tiny violin…
Don’t these losers have a motto? Isn’t it “Fuck around and find out”? Well, this fuckwit sure fucked around and now he’s findin’ out.
(Source: dailykos.com)
The New York Times profiles the 'most influential' purveyor of online COVID vaccine misinformation -
Many of us who maintain a social media presence have at least one acquaintance, “Facebook friend” or real-life, actual friend who has in the past year shared some type of official-sounding, medical jargon-laden post questioning the value of the COVID-19 vaccines — or worse, directly asserting or implying that such vaccines are ineffective, harmful, deadly, or will lead to untold health problems.
According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a US/UK non-profit dedicated to fighting online disinformation and hate, nearly two-thirds of the anti-vaccine propaganda peddled in online forums and social media can be traced to exactly twelve individuals, colloquially labelled the “Disinformation Dozen.” If you are someone who spends a significant time in social media forums, the chances are high that you have seen, scrolled through or otherwise had some awareness of their activity online, be it in your local school board’s Facebook feed or other community sounding boards where supposedly informed individuals trade opinions and information.
According to the New York Times, and as confirmed in the CCDH’s comprehensive report profiling these individuals, the number one purveyor of this vaccine misinformation is a gentleman named Joseph Mercola, described by the Times as an osteopathic physician. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he currently headquarters his company in the state of Florida, which, as USA Today’s Nada Hassanein illustrates, is rapidly emerging as the nation’s predominant “hotspot” for spiking COVID-19 infections, almost entirely among those who have refused to be vaccinated against the virus.
On Saturday the Times’ Sheera Frankel profiled Dr. Mercola and cited multiple examples of his work, beginning with an article he published that appeared on Facebook in February. As Frankel reports, that article, clocking in at 3400 words, “declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease.” The article (now deleted by Facebook) purportedly claimed that COVID-19 vaccines “alter[ed] your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.” Spread by other anti-vaccine activists and translated into multiple languages, these assertions eventually reached 400,000 Facebook viewers.
Mercola, described as an “internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens,” has, according to Frankel’s reporting, published approximately 600 articles on Facebook since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. …
(Source: dailykos.com)